Wednesday, 5 October 2016

When I first
read the report yesterday about the speech by the Secretary of State for Wales, it immediately struck me
that he was, in effect, proposing that any future regional aid from the UK
Treasury to Wales should be managed and controlled from London, not Cardiff,
even if he didn’t say that directly. Today’s comments
by the leader of the Conservatives in the Assembly seem to fill in the gap very
well. Not one for a subtle approach to
saying what he thinks, Andrew RT Davies has made it very clear that he wants
this money managed for Wales not by Wales.
It’s hard to interpret this double-pronged approach as other than the
start of a post-Brexit process of removing authority from the Assembly.

They justify it,
of course, on the basis of an argument that what matters is not who does it,
but that it’s done right. The problem
with that argument is that it means that anything which Cardiff can’t do ‘right’
is fair game for transfer to our masters in London who are apparently uniquely
qualified to do everything properly. By
sheer coincidence, there was another story
today, reporting on the comments by Professor Richard Wyn Jones including a
suggestion that UK institutions have not adapted to devolution. He said: “…
what’s striking about the central institutions of the UK state is they have not
changed at all as a result of devolution”.
It occurred to me that the comments by Davies and Cairns sum up fairly
well why the UK’s central institutions haven’t adapted, and see no need to
adapt, to devolution. It’s simply that
they see devolution not about any recognition of the UK being some sort of
partnership of nations (even though they use those words) but about an approach
to administration – just another part of local government, in effect. From that perspective, why should they need
to adapt?

Anyway, back to
European funding and the Tories’ criticism of the way Labour have managed
it. I have a lot of sympathy with that
they are saying in this instance. It’s
perhaps unfair of them to single out Labour alone for their criticism – I don’t
remember things being spectacularly better-managed during the One Wales period –
but that just underlines that their purpose here is more about political
point-scoring than about improving things – and I’ll return to that point
shortly.

Over recent
years, I’ve been present (as a translator) at a lot of meetings discussing
European funding and how to spend it. I
won’t go into individual details, but I have two clear impressions coming out
of a range of different discussions. The
first is that European structural funds have spawned something of a consultancy
industry in Wales as people line themselves up to help others make applications
for funding, and get paid out of those same funds themselves. The second is of a culture where business
plans are written to tick the boxes with the funders rather than as a serious
attempt to describe what projects will do – on two occasions, I’ve even heard
them referred to as being ‘akin to creative writing’.

In addition to
that, I’ve witnessed delays and arguments about the release of funding and a
bureaucracy being built up to manage and report on the use of funding. All of these reduce the amount of funding
which eventually gets spent directly on meeting the objectives of projects.

In all those
senses, the Tories have a point. But I’d
argue that these are all peripheral points to what I would see as the central
criticism, and it’s a criticism that the Tories haven’t even made as far as I
can see. It is this: rather than being
seen as special, short-term, one-off funding which the Welsh Government could
use to meet a strategic aim of improving the Welsh economy, the money has been
seen as a pot of available cash for which people and groups can apply. This may well have enabled a number of things
to be done which would not otherwise have been done – but it has also created a
wealth of photo-ops for Welsh ministers and for creating and sponsoring client
groups (and I leave it to readers to come to their own conclusion about the
relative importance of these things to those involved). But, and it’s a very big but, there have been
no visible underlying objectives or strategy for achieving them. It has been a massive missed opportunity for
Wales.

The problem
with the Tories’ position is that in the desire to make a political point about
the incompetence of Labour in particular (and by implication, Welsh
institutions in general) they have concentrated on the froth and offered only a
different process for controlling and managing the expenditure. They are no more offering a vision or
strategy than Labour, and that means that their proposed ‘solution’ is no such
thing.

Wales deserves
better, but there’s something rather old-style colonial in the apparent belief
that better simply means someone doing it for us rather than us doing it
ourselves.